Originally the diary of 4 months spent in Antarctica working as a documentary film sound recordist, this blog has evolved into an online repository for the thoughts, travels and trivia of the writer Richard Fleming. For McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and polar exploration, see August through December of '06. Currently you are likely to find in these pages chronicles of my actual and literary meanderings, as well as notes on my many other passions. Also, did I mention I wrote a book?

7/30/2007

Edvard Munch and the Sooty-Cheeked Mangabey

I don't remember enough of the the particulars of Edvard Munch's biography to recall whether his angst was of purely Scandinavian distillation or if, like many artists of the time, he went on exotic journeys, which then fueled his depressive aspect. He seems most unlikely to have ever travelled to the Albertine Rift, one of the least and last visited slivers of central Africa, a mountain chain of cloud forests defining much of the Congo's eastern frontier with Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda. Nonetheless, a few days ago, there in the Nyungwe Forest, I thought of him.

Had Munch come here and observed the diverse array of primate species that dwell in these dark, damp and fog-shrouded forests I am certain he would have been much taken with the Sooty-Cheeked Mangabey, an extraordinarily gloomy-looking monkey with a very long tail.

Furred entirely in dismal gray tones, the unhappy Mangabey sports for facial decoration twin charcoal black streaks under its eyes, like those worn by American Football players to protect their vision from the glare of their own rosy cheeks. (What a bizarre, pseudo-military, macho affectation--nobody does this in any other sport, do they?[Update: Yes, apparently, baseball, see comments]). Worse, the pinched and panicked look on the Mangabey's face seems to permanently express the particular grief of constipation. I hope these photographs, taken in the dim and misty depths of the forest interior, are suitably pathetic.

(Mangabey images mine, as are all uncredited photographs in these pages: Munch images hooped absolutely without permission from here, according to my own personal and constantly evolving fair use doctrine. Anyone with legitimate issues contact me and I will do my best to resolve them.)